Caffarelli Arrives had seen his mistake. Therefore, in the shadow of the Prince, Society hurried to support Handel afresh. Faramondo was not a good opera. From Handel it was indifferent work. The libretto was futile, and the music at no point reached his accustomed height. His health still worried him, and his debtors plagued him yet more. Not that he would have offered these nuisances by way of excuse. When the public applauded the opera on its production it is possible that the sight of its composer back in his old place inspired much of the sentiment, for the takings of the box-office failed to reflect this enthusiasm. The Press acclaimed the work. "Last night_the new opera of Faramondo was performed at the King's Theatre to a splendid audience," declared one journal on 4th January, "and met with general applause. It being the first time of Mr Handel's appearance this season, he was honour'd with extraordinary and repeated signs of approbation." A new singer had been imported from Italy for the opera, a castrato named Caffarelli, and possibly he helped considerably as a draw. Was he a new Farinelli? All London was wanting a new Farinelli. It wanted a Farinelli with a smattering of manners. A creature to lionise who had legitimate gifts and the breeding to carry rather than intrude them. The public had not forgiven the Prince and Porpora for the wild-cat schemes at the King's so recently, which, whilst they had produced Farinelli out of revolution, had lost him again, and for ever. Handel himself was tired of castrati, and had distinct leanings toward Beard as his principal male singer. But he hesitated to cut out the castrato part altogether so soon after the glories of Farinelli. He therefore wrote several songs in Faramondo for Caffarelli, and waited for the public to call when it had had enough of such singers. Not that London ever approved Caffarelli in full measure, for after he had sung in Faramondo and Handel's succeeding opera, Serse, he went back to Italy a disappointed man. He began a career of extraordinary brilliance which made his name a byword in every city of the Continent. He was fêted. They flooded him with money. He was carried to the theatre in a carriage hidden in a garment of flowers. He accumulated an enormous fortune, with the aid of which he built a great palace, as Farinelli had done before him. Indeed, the size of one's palace on retirement from the stage was the best indication of one's quality as a singer in those years. Porpora had found Caffarelli years before-many years before Handel had heard his name. For Porpora with his ugly habits, his vanity that would not allow him to sit down to a meal with any of his singers except his principals, who talked to the Prince of Wales as he might to a scene-shifter, and addressed him intimately by his Christian name, was, at the back of it all, the greatest impresario seen in London for a hundred years. He had a most uncanny flair for discovering genius. Caffarelli was a case in point. He had been a peasant's child-his real name was Gaetano Majorano till the composer Cafaro took hold of him and began to teach him music, and then the boy adopted a form of his name. Caffarelli was sent to Naples. To Porpora. For five to six years Porpora kept that youth to the study of one page of exercises, then he told him to depart. Go, my son," he is reported to have said. "I have nothing more to teach you. You are the greatest singer of the age. 99 1 If this incident were not so like Porpora, so sure a product of his mixture of eccentricity and genius, it would be easy to disbelieve it. When Caffarelli originally appeared on the stage at Rome at the age of twenty-one, he had a voice of beauty that seemed to sing from the stars. He played a woman's part, and Rome went tumbling out of the theatre into the night, conscious of a great discovery. Caffarelli was thirtyfive when Faramondo was produced, and yet London had never heard of him. But the London of Handel was only selfcontained in its musical knowledge, in which perhaps lies the reason for that ultimate change coming upon Handel himself. A change which made him compose music such as could never have been a product of the Continent. Neither Handel nor Caffarelli could save Faramondo. After a few performances it was taken off. Heidegger had lost money over it, and Handel's creditors were more clamorous than ever. In a frantic fit of desperation he produced a pasticcio of his 1 Grove's "Dictionary of Music," vol. i. own works on 25th February 1738, under the title of Alessandro Severus. It failed more dismally than Faramondo had done, and his plight became extreme. Del Pò was not only forcing his claim for settlement of his debt, but was vicious, ready now to go to the fullest limit of the law, so that Handel was threatened with a new bankruptcy and the debtors' prison. Yet he asked for no favours, called for no mercy as he might well have done, seeing that he had made his creditor's wife, Strada, all she had become. Some friends forced the issue that saved the situation. Handel was fifty-three, and if his intellect was only just on the threshold of the great maturity that gave his best-remembered works to the world, his physical powers were sinking. Rheumatism, the product of his absurd neglect of his health, had been fought down once, but was beginning to recur. He drew more and more into himself, his pride smitten by his inability to force a way by settlement with those who held him in thrall. His friends suggested that a benefit concert should be given for him. He scouted the idea. He was angry-violently angry. He had not come down to beggary, he declared, and such affairs were the bald emblazonment of a flat purse. This at fifty-three, when he had written more notes-and better notes-than any man for many epochs. He let off salvoes from his mingled English-German vocabulary. He swore. He stormed. Ultimately they made him accept the concert. It was given on the 28th March 1738. Far from being considered in the nature of a charity, Society looked upon it as a special affair that should not be missed. The theatre filled, and still Society poured in. "Over five hundred persons of rank and fashion were discovered on the stage." And the profit to Handel for that one night, when he secretly hugged to himself his pride, much as he might have done a child of his own that had been hurt, was a record figure. Society, all London, told him, in that spontaneous honouring, that if he were in the throes of penury he was still Handel. The concert gave him something over a thousand pounds with which he paid del Pò, and condemned him to the Shades with all the other creditors to keep him company. His financial worries at an end for a while, he completed Serse and produced it at the King's Theatre on 15th April. It was the second of the two operas for which Heidegger had offered him £1000. Serse is one of the big mysteries in Handel's life. No one knows where he obtained the libretto, or why he should suddenly adopt broad farce and expect to make a success of it. He may have had it in his mind to cut into the success of The Beggar's Opera, but Serse was about the last work that would do it. He could certainly have been in no mood for farce after the anxieties on the grounds of health and finance, through which he had passed, and from which he had not as yet escaped. In spite of all the incongruity of Serse, it produced the air which, through the two centuries that have since nearly elapsed, has been better known to the public at large, and more frequently played, than anything Handel ever composed―an air about the shadow of a plane-tree, and better known as the famous "Largo." Out of this absurdity, Serse, which had no raison d'être, no beginning and no end, Handel in a mood conjured a piece of melody which, now, as then, holds a theatre audience when it is played, and remains one of the master melodies of the world. Not that Serse could stand on a single air. Before the season had ended the King's Theatre had closed down, and Heidegger had decided that, for the time at any rate, Handel was an expensive form of speculation. But one man, at least, had made a lot of money out of Handel whilst the theatres had been losing on him. This was Jonathan Tyers, who ran Vauxhall Gardens as an evening pleasure haunt for the better classes of Society. Tyers was a queer mixture of artistic inclination and hard commercialism. He had opened the Gardens six years before on a stretch of ground he leased from Elizabeth Masters at the cheap rental of £250 a year. It had been a great opening. The Prince of Wales had been present, with a guard of one hundred soldiers. with fixed bayonets. Tyers arranged all possible demonstration for the pomp-loving Frederick, and the hundred bayonets was the finishing touch, for only four hundred persons paid for admission! Frederick, with his little army, was disgusted; all this would make him appear a coward to a handful of people. |